16 Cardozo Law Review 241 (1994); reprinted by permission of the Cardozo Law Review

Notes: Conclusion

715. To this extent I
would disagree with Richard Rorty, who has
argued that "[a] historical epoch dominated by Greek ocular metaphors
may, I suggest, yield to one in which the philosophical vocabulary
incorporating these metaphors seems as quaint as the animistic
vocabulary of pre-classical times." Rorty, supra note 536, at 11.

716. See generally
Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Difference and
Dominance: On Sex Discrimination," in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses
on Life and Law 32, 39 (1987) ("I am critical of affirming what we
have been, which necessarily is what we have been permitted, as if it
is women's, ours, possessive.").

717. For a discussion
of the importance of "reclaiming the
visual" in feminism in particular, see Ellen L. Fox, "Seeing Through
Women's Eyes: The Role of Vision in Women's Moral Theory," in
Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and Practice 111 (Eve B. Cole
& Susan Coultrop-McQuin eds., 1992); Diane Shoos, "The Female Subject
of Popular Culture," 7 Hypatia 215 (1992); see also Donna Haraway,
"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective," 14 Feminist Stud. 575, 582 (1988)
("I want a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes
vision again, because we need to reclaim that sense to find our way
through all the visualizing tricks and powers of modern sciences and
technologies that have transformed the objectivity debates.").

718. See generally
Don Ihde, Technics and Praxis 82-92 (1979);
Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural
Critique 102-04 (1993); Neil Evernden, "Seeing and Being Seen: A
Response to Susan Sontag's Essays on Photography," 68 Soundings 72
(1985); Stephen Houlgate, "Vision, Reflection and Openness: The
Hegemony of Vision from a Hegelian Point of View," in Modernity, supra
note 75, at 8. In the legal literature, see Rose, supra note 64, at
273.

719. On the modern
TV- and film-inspired resurgence of gesture as
a, and even the, visual medium, see Edmund Carpenter, "The New
Languages", in Explorations In Communication, supra note 45, at 162,
170-71. For a brief discussion of the phenomenological qualities of
gesture (comparing those with the qualities traditionally associated
with sound), see Ong, supra note 75, at 147.

If television is
ocularcentric-and in many ways it is-it
nevertheless revisions the eye. The eye of ego consciousness, the eye
of the reader of the book, arises within a cultural-historical moment
in which the ego as disembodied spectator is invited to keep his or
her eye, singular, fixed, and distant, upon the world. . . . The
television eye, the ocularcentrism of the television experience, is of
a quite different sort. . . . [T]he eye of television consciousness is
re-minded of the body. Seduced by images, a seduction which is to be
sure not without its problems, the eye of the television body is an
emotional vision, a vision that is moved at a body level.

Romanyshyn, supra note 75, at 341.

721. As it arguably
did in Marcel Duchamp's painting Nude
Descending a Staircase and Giacomo Bella's Dog on a Leash.

723. A
phenomenologically compatible alternative to reconceiving
vision in terms of gesture could involve reconceiving the act of
seeing itself as an active mutual "glance" instead of a fixed, passive
"gaze." For an extended discussion of the idea of the "glance" and its
distinct phenomenological implications, see Deena Weinstein & Michael
Weinstein, "On the Visual Constitution of Society: The Contributions of
Georg Simmel and Jean-Paul Sartre to a Sociology of the Senses," 5
Hist. Eur. Ideas 349 (1984). On movies and television (with their hard
cuts and constant perspective shifts) as promoters of a visual
experience made up of discrete glances, as opposed to a fixed view or
gaze, see Tyrwhitt, supra note 374, at 95.

724. "[T]he spoken
word, the new orality, must face up to the
technical apparatuses that support it and diffuse it with a rare
efficiency, but at the same time condition and coopt it . . . .
Franco Ferrarotti, The End of Conversation: The Impact of Mass Media
on Modern Society 39 (1988).

726. Thus, the
loudspeaker or the incessant voice of the radio,
both of which have historically been associated with the power of
dictatorial regimes. On the use of these aural instrumentalities in
Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, see Schafer, supra
note 474, at 91-92. In a more contemporary context Schafer has
observed that "the intense amplification of popular music does not
stimulate sociability so much as it expresses the desire to experience
individuation . . . aloneness . . . disengagement." Id. at 96; see
also Ackerman, supra note 166, at 187.

727. "[A]ural
perception and oral expression neither presuppose
nor guarantee a more 'personal' idea or use of knowledge. That the
spoken word . . . lends itself less easily to apersonal forms of
fixation and transmission than images or print, can no longer be taken
as a truism. New techniques available to record (and process) spoken
language . . . make the old divisions harder to maintain"
. . . . Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes
Its Object 119 (1983).